Show HN: An icon for every city in North America | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An icon for every city in North America

evans.bike

18 pointscivilchaos20 comments

To my knowledge there is no icon pack for cities in NA below a certain size. So I created one! An icon for every city in NA with >100k population. 544 in total. Generated with Nano Banana Pro. These cost me ~$70 to generate. Giving away for free! Some exceptions are 1 city for each US state that didn't have a city above 100k population such as Burlington Vermont. I also took liberties with what icon was used such as Whale Tales for BTV. Surprisingly, smaller cities have many competing landmarks and it can be hard to choose! Feel free to contribute corrections.

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AI icons, ofc...some of which are questionable (as it is with AI). Many of them are generic clock tower icons with small variations, while some are showing an icon that is based on a marginal attraction in the area. eg Irvine is known for the Irvine Company, John Wayne Airport, not for the symbolic amusement park hot air balloon raised in 2007.

OTOH, Greensboro being the diner chairs from the sit-ins that started there is quite the deep cut.

I'm enthusiastic about the idea, but I think the approach is flawed. "Cities over 100k" misses the real regional keystones (some of which are really counties, not cities), so I'm seeing ones that I would expect to be there missing. And the ones I do know aren't the best represented.

Specifics: Alexandria is basically DC, and probably shouldn't be included without several places that are missing in Maryland. I have no idea what Baltimore's icon is supposed to be (edit: wait, is that supposed to be the Domino Sugar sign?), and while the Capitol dome is a decent choice, the Washington Monument would probably work better as a symbol of Washington.

This could really be a launching point for crowdsourcing a more handcrafted set, though.

Yeah, it's not accounting for metropolitan areas very well. I found it kind of hilarious that Federal Way, WA (a minor part of the Seattle metro area) got an icon but Olympia (the state capitol!) didn't- because Federal Way has a population of 100k in the city proper but Olympia only has 55k (but its metro area has 300k).

Interesting idea but it is weirdly inconsistent. Their own icon shows Burlington Vermont only has a population of 44k yet it was used as the poster city in the example.

Meanwhile, cities like Nashua, New Hampshire (the second largest city North of Boston in New England) is absent because it only has about ~93k people despite being driving distance to BVT.

It is also worth noting that in the US, city status is not directly tied to population.

Portland Maine is 66k people and it has an icon.

Edit: also interesting that for Boston it is the Zacim Bridge, which is iconic but wouldn't have been my first thought. I would have thought a lobster, or a pilgrim hat, or Fenway park or something like that.

Neat! I'm surprised my city of Lakewood, Colorado showed up. Of course the icon is of Casa Bonita lol

How well do the models do if you ask for an SVG instead of just generating a PNG? It would make editing & using them easier, but I don't know if image generation still wins for these types of icons.

Good choice in using the city hall for Buffalo, although the entrance shown is entirely made up.

On the other hand, I can’t tell what St. Petersburg is supposed to be. Is that the Dali Museum?

Cool idea, but evidently most cities do not have an iconic enough thing for this to be viable for them. You'd probably have to dip into sports team logos.

Remember to set minimum input text size at 16px to avoid iOS zoom in on focus.

Why is Atlanta a phoenix but Phoenix, the 5th largest city in the US, not?

Is Atlanta really a phoenix or a falcon? Also, why do some cities have more than one icon? Seattle has the Space Needle, yet Dallas is a cowboy hat and not the Reunion Tower. Dallas has fewer cowboy hats being worn than other cities. I'd put all of this down to how lame vibe coded content is due to the limitations of LLMs

It’s a phoenix alright, which apparently is on their city flag, but so is Phoenix’s…

Maybe it started in a different city, bought, and then moved but kept the iconography like the Jazz?? Yeah, I just compared a city to a sports franchise

It's Phoenix; I assure you the comparison does not offend us.

Atlanta should clearly have been a bottle of Coca-Cola. And Cancun a bottle of Corona with a bikini on it.

That or just ATL. Text on place-icons might break the rules of iconography, but it's still good branding!

Icons are supposed to have some amount of stroke width consistency, detail consistency, etc. This is giving AI slop vibes immediately.

The AI slop is admitted in the description? Or you mean.. worse than you expected for an AI generated project?

very nice, saved!

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